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Torban ( Ukrainian торбан ), also teorban , is a plucked neck lute that is played in the Ukraine and was also widespread in Poland , Lithuania and Russia in the 19th century . With the names related Theorbe belonging to the introduced in the 16th century in Western Europe archlutes belongs, connects the Torban a leading beside the fretboard to a second peg box on the elongated neck group of bass strings and like the Ukrainian sounds Kobsa it has a number of treble Secondary strings that run over the top of the body.

origin

Lute instruments with a presumably pear-shaped body and a long or short neck as well as slender box zithers of the gusli type have been known in the East Slavic regions since the early Middle Ages. For the first time in the Ukraine a lute player is depicted in the 11th century on a mural in the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev . Ukrainian lutes with a short and a long neck each with six strings, which were called kobsa , can be seen in images from the 16th to the 18th centuries . At a time that is not precisely known - possibly around 1700 - some of the short-necked lutes were given a group of short treble strings on the top, either by adopting Western European lute instruments or by adapting them to the box zithers common in the Baltic States and Russia, which are only plucked empty. The Ukrainian bandura represents a further development in the direction of a box zither , in which all strings are plucked empty and only the body shape with its neck is reminiscent of a lute instrument. For these treble strings (Ukrainian pristrunki ), which are also used in the torban , there are hardly any models of historical lute instruments outside the region.

In contrast to kobsa and bandura , which were mainly used by song singers to accompany folk music, the torban is an instrument that, due to its complex shape and high production costs, was part of the musical entertainment of the upper class. The long bass strings, which are available as a special third group of strings, make the torban a representative of the arch lute .

As archlutes a group of introduced in the 16th century in Italy sounds are with collars indicated in which extend beside the fretboard bass strings to a second peg box. A Shahrud called plucked string instrument, which the Persian musicians as in Central Asia in the early 10th century, Abd al-Qadir "twice as long as one (around 1350-1435) 'ūd was" interpreted Henry George Farmer (1962) as a kind Erzlaute. Another historical plucked instrument from the family of the Arabic long-necked lute tanbūr , which farmers classify as arch lute , was called mugnī and is said to have had 24 strings. His invention is attributed to Safi ad-Din al-Urmawi in the 13th century. Curt Sachs (1940) mentions this mugnī as a combination of lute and zither in connection with the torban , because he does not consider a direct descent of the torban from the theorbo to be likely and is looking for an oriental origin especially for the treble strings .

There were evidently individual efforts in medieval Arabic music to introduce very complex stringed instruments. What these instruments looked like can often not be reconstructed exactly from the sources, which is why misjudgments are possible. For example, according to Farmer (1939), the musician Ibn at-Tahhan al-Musiqi, who lived in Egypt during the Fatimid rule in the first half of the 11th century, invented an arch lute with four or five double strings and a length of 180 centimeters. Farmer calculated the length from the Arabic measurements. After the extraordinary size of the instrument had been discussed in the specialist literature for 40 years, exhaustive plausibility considerations in 1979 revealed that the sound was probably only about half as large.

Bass lute in the form of a fat-bellied oriental kink-neck lute. Illustration from the Cantigas de Santa Maria , 13th century.

Short-necked lutes with a pear-shaped body came from Western Asia to the Iberian Peninsula in the course of the Islamic conquest and were depicted in numerous Spanish book illustrations in the 13th century. An illustration in the song collection Cantigas de Santa Maria , created during the reign of King Alfonso X (r. 1252–1282) shows a large bass lute based on the model of the ʿūd without frets with nine lateral tuning pegs for probably four double strings and one highest string ( chanterelle ), but it was not until the second half of the 16th century that string instruments in the bass register gained importance. Since lute players find it difficult to shorten the strings with their left hand if a certain width of the fingerboard is exceeded, bass strings were added to the side that cannot be fingered. The Italian name arciliuto (meaning "enlarged lute"), which probably goes back to the composer and lute player Alessandro Piccinini (1566 - around 1638), was known before 1590 and referred to a lute with an extended neck and an additional pegbox. Double strings, tuning and the musical use of the contemporary Renaissance lute were retained in the early elongated instruments. The art collection set up by Raymund Fugger in Augsburg in 1566 contained “a fish-like lute with two collars”. This is the first known mention of an elongated lute. Several experimental narrative variants followed in the course of the 16th century. In the 1620s, up to eleven double strings were common for the arch - sounds called liuti attiorbati , of which six to seven led across frets.

Michael Praetorius : Syntagma musicum , Volume 2, 1619, Plate XVI, No. 2 shows a "Lute with deductions or Testudo Theorbata".
A short-necked lute developed by Vendelino Venere ( Tieffenbrucker ) in Padua in 1595 with a chanterelle and five double strings above a fretboard with frets and four empty bass strings attached to the side of the peg plate. A preliminary stage to the narrative.

One of the Italian archlauts was the theorbo , whose Italian names tiorba and chitarrone were used synonymously in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The name chitarrone , first mentioned in 1589 by Bastiano de Rossi , is the augmentative form of chitarra , which is derived from the Greek kithara , and literally means "big guitar"; the origin of the word tiorba is speculative. The theorbo was probably first made in Padua at the end of the 16th century . The scholar Giovanni Florio mentions in his Italian-English dictionary of 1598 the “tiorba as a kind of folk musical instrument” and in the edition of 1611 the “tiorba is a musical instrument played by the blind”. The theorbo was apparently not yet counted among the known lutes, but soon developed into a popular figured bass instrument in large orchestras and for song accompaniment, which was used until the second half of the 18th century. In Syntagma musicum (1619) Michael Praetorius depicts a theorbo with seven or eight double strings above the fingerboard and six individual bass strings, which he calls Testudo Theorbata (“theorbed sounds”; testudo means “lute”, originally “turtle”, according to Latin lyra ).

In addition to the multitude of constructive solutions for the upper attachment of the additional strings to pegboxes, there is an unusual attempt not to lead the strings at the lower end over a common bridge, but to fix them to a stepped row of individual saddles on the ceiling. A preserved example from the 16th century, which is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, is listed in an inventory catalog from 1596 as “mer ain grand selczame lute with two collars and three stars” (“rather a large strange lute with two peg boxes and three Sound holes "). The instrument with an elongated body with a baroque curve on the right side and two very short necks next to one another has typologically changed from a lute to a box zither . The top fastening of the three shortest strings with tuning pegs on the frame next to the neck is remarkable. This type of fastening is otherwise unknown in Western European stringed instruments, but it is characteristic of the Ukrainian lute (see the 18th century torban shown below ). Another strange string instrument with a pear-shaped lute body and a neck that is not bent backwards but upwards is shown in the Syntagma musicum on plate XXXVI, no.2. According to the illustration, the string level is freely located between the neck and a bridge diagonally on the top of the body, like a harp , which is why the "strange lute ... like the harp" should be traced.

The name torban ( teorban ) is derived from tiorba . In Western Ukraine, he was still in use in the 19th century for different instruments sound, so for Kobsa, bandura, the Mandora appropriate sounds and archlutes. Even in literary works of the 19th century, for example in Ivan Franko's historical description of Sachar Berkut: An image of public life in the Carpathian Rus in the 13th century , a torban instead of a kobsa is wrongly mentioned .

The Kingdom of Poland initially played a mediating role in the cultural influences of Western Europe on Russia and the Ukraine, which became apparent from the beginning of the 17th century . Under Tsar Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725) there was a direct cultural exchange between Western Europe and the now powerful Russia. The archlute, violin and other Western European musical instruments reached the Ukraine and on to Russia via Poland. According to a Polish source, there was a Ukrainian bandura player at the court of Cracow in 1441 and one of the court musicians of the Polish King Sigismund I (r. 1507–1548) is said to have been a Ukrainian bandura player with whom the king also played chess. These are the earliest written references to Ukrainian lute players. In the 18th century, the string instruments kobsa, bandura (bowl-neck lute), violin, bass violin, gusli (box zither), bandurka (small five-string guitar) and torban were mentioned in Ukraine . It is unclear when the ore lute called torban was introduced. Speculatively, their invention was attributed to a Polish Pauline monk from Jasna Góra named Tuliglowski between 1735 and 1740 , even if the name teorban already existed before. Tuliglowski played on his instrument, which he called tuli di gambe , Emperor Charles VI. in Vienna, where he had traveled in the wake of Prince Lubomirski. The monk Tuligowski appears in only one Polish source. The name gambe is not absurd, because the viola da gamba and the theorbo complemented each other tonally in baroque music and were often used together.

In the 19th century, the torban was used temporarily in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, except in the Ukraine, until the bourgeois musical instrument went out of fashion everywhere after the Russian Revolution because it did not correspond to the Soviet model of society. A total of 40 torban from the 19th century are kept in the museums of Lviv and Perejaslav in the Ukraine, in Saint Petersburg and in other museums , compared to only 6 preserved bandura from this period. 14 torban alone are in Saint Petersburg. The manufacturer of most of the torban is unknown, only the names of three instrument makers have survived.

Design

Torban from the 18th century with three tuning
pegs for treble strings. Drawing in Zygmunt Gloger : Encyklopedia staropolska ilustrowana ("Old Polish Encyclopedia"), 1900–1903.

None of the examples from the 19th century are alike. What they all have in common is a pear-shaped, deep-bellied body, which, like the ʿūd or the lute, consists of glued wood chips on the floor. In an example from the second half of the 18th century, the body back consists of eleven maple lamellas. The total length of this instrument called by Georg Kinsky (1912) “Russian theorbo” and “Torbana” is 115–120 centimeters with a scale length of 62–64 centimeters, its body is 52 centimeters long and 35 centimeters wide. A Russian name of this type in use in the 19th century is bandura panskaja ("stately bandura").

A relatively close relative of the torban is the "Swedish theorbo", a variant of the Western European theorbo without treble strings, which, unlike the Ukrainian instrument, has a flat bottom like a cister and was played in Sweden until the mid-19th century.

The ceiling of the torban is flat and usually has a central round sound hole. All strings are attached at the lower end directly to the bridge , which sits across almost the entire width of the body on the top. Ten to fourteen gut strings are run across the fingerboard. Of these, the highest two or four strings (chanterelle) occur individually, the others are double strings tuned octave apart. A tuning common at the beginning of the 20th century for five double strings and two chanterelles is: C – c – D – d – G – g – c – c 1 –f – f 1 –g 1 –a 1 and for the open strings: D –G – C – F, after another statement D – G – c – G. For the 14 treble strings, pitches from b 1 to a 3 are listed.

Some fingerboards have attached frets, otherwise they are fretless. Usually four to six, single or double-choir bass strings lead past the side of the fingerboard to a second pegbox on the elongated and often curved neck. All wooden pegs are lateral. So far the construction corresponds to an arch lute. In addition, there are twelve to fourteen treble strings ( pristrunki ) - on some instruments only three to five - which are not tapped and are tuned diatonic from b 1 to a 3 . They run across the top like a box zither and are attached to a series of small tuning pegs on the curved upper edge of the body. Their arrangement refers to the corresponding version of the kobsa as a model, which also influenced the development of the bandura .

Hardly any notations have survived, especially for the torban . The mood of the torban was based on the F major triad . Judging by the few pieces of music collected at the end of the 19th century, the torban was only used for the keys of F major , C major , F minor and C minor ; for minor keys the A strings have been reduced to A flat. Today's Ukrainian torban has a total of around 30 strings.

Style of play

In the 17th century the torban was part of the musical entertainment of the Ukrainian nobility. The torban was most widespread after the middle of the 18th century, when many Ukrainian musicians were employed by the Polish royal houses. The lute was also popular in Russia in the first three decades of the 19th century, and was played in Poland until the end of the 19th century. Few goalkeepers of the 19th century are known by name. They include the Russian diplomat Andrei Kirillowitsch Rasumowski (1752–1836), the Ukrainian poet Tomasz Padura (1801–1871), the Torban family Widort with Gregor Widort, who came to the Ukraine from Austria at the end of the 18th century, his son Katejan and his son Franz Widort; also Ivan Aleksandrow in Moscow, to whom a Jewish soldier from Poland taught torban, the Ukrainian bandura and torban player Wasil Shevchenko (1882–1964); Count Alexei Grigorjewitsch Rasumowski (1709–1771), the Ukrainian lute player and composer Tymofij Bilohradskyj (around 1710 - around 1782) and the Polish poet Maria Konopnicka (1842–1910).

The Torban was at the game as a lute obliquely to the side, or as a bandura held vertically in front of the torso or as a plucked Zither in a lying position. Little is known of the orally transmitted music, apart from a few songs by Franz Widort, which the Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912) collected and published in 1892.

After the torban disappeared around 1920, it has been restored in various forms since the end of the 20th century, roughly based on museum models. The previous assignment of kobsa and bandura as accompanying instruments for folk song singers and the torban as an instrument of court music culture no longer exists. The stringed instruments mentioned, together with violins, bass violins ( basolia ), hurdy-gurdy ( lira ), dulcimer ( cimbalom ) and flutes ( sopilka ), are part of the instrumental accompaniment of modernized vocal folk music. The shape, mood and repertoire of today's torban have changed, like the bandura , compared to the 19th century.

Others

Torban is also the name of a music society founded in Lviv in 1869 by the composer Anatole Wachnianin (1841–1908), which existed until 1871. A private music publisher founded in Lviv in 1905, called "Ukrainische Druckerei Torban", published over 300 notations of works by Ukrainian composers by 1940.

literature

  • Laurence Libin: Torban. In: Grove Music Online. 22nd September 2015.
  • Sibyl Marcuse : A Survey of Musical Instruments. Harper & Row, New York 1975.

Web links

Commons : Torban  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Kobza. In: Grove Music Online. May 25, 2016.
  2. ^ Roman Turovsky: II. Palaeographia Testudinis Bisantina & Ruthenica. torban.org
  3. Henry George Farmer : ʿAbdalqādir ibn Ġaibī on Instruments of Music. In: Oriens. Volume 15, December 1962, pp. 242-248, here pp. 244, 246.
  4. ^ Curt Sachs : The History of Musical Instruments. WW Norton, New York 1940, p. 372.
  5. ^ Henry George Farmer: The Structure of the Arabian and Persian Lute in the Middle Ages. In: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. No. 1, January 1939, pp. 41-51, here p. 47.
  6. Amine Beyhom: Two Common Errors about the Proportions of the ʿūd: Ibn a-ṭ-Ṭaḥḥān and al-Kindī . In: Iconea. Near and Middle Eastern Archeomusicology. 2011, pp. 81–110, here p. 82f.
  7. ^ Curt Sachs: The History of Musical Instruments . WW Norton, New York 1940, pp. 252, 260.
  8. Lynda Sayce: Archlute. In: Grove Music Online. 2001.
  9. James Tyler: Chitarrone. In: Grove Music Online. 2001.
  10. ^ Douglas Alton Smith: On the Origin of the Chitarrone. In: Journal of the American Musicological Society. Volume 32, No. 3, Fall 1979, pp. 440-462, here p. 441.
  11. ^ John Downing: Further to Comm. 2027 - In Search of the Colascione or Neapolitan Tiorba. FoMRHI Comm. 2042
  12. ^ Sibyl Marcuse, 1975, p. 425.
  13. Hans Radke: Theorbed sounds (Liuto attiorbato) and arched sounds (Arciliuto). In: The music research. Volume 25, Issue 4, October-December 1972, pp. 481–484, here p. 482.
  14. ^ Friedemann Hellwig: The Morphology of Lutes with Extended Bass Strings. In: Early Music. Volume 9, No. 4 ( Plucked-String Issue 2) October 1981, pp. 447-454, here p. 453.
  15. Sibyl Marcuse, 1975, pp. 424f.
  16. Jerzy S. Golos: Polish Influences in Russian Music Before the Eighteenth Century. In: The Polish Review. Volume 5, No. 2, spring 1960, pp. 8-17, here p. 9.
  17. MJ Diakowsky: A Note on the History of the Bandura. In: The Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US Volume 6, Nos. 3-4, 1958, p. 1419.
  18. ^ Roman Turovsky: III. The torban: the history . torban.org
  19. ^ Roman Turovsky: III. The torban (Part II). torban.org
  20. ^ Hermann Ruth-Sommer: Old musical instruments. A guide for collectors . Second edition. Richard Carl Schmidt & Co., Berlin 1920, p. 30.
  21. ^ Georg Kinsky : Catalog of the Museum of Music History by Wilhelm Heyer in Cologne. Second volume: plucked and stringed instruments. Wilhelm Heyer, Cologne 1912, pp. 106, 110.
  22. Georg Kinsky, 1912, p. 110; Franz Jahnel, 1977, p. 28, considers the tuning of the two upper strings g 1 and a 1 to be technically impossible due to the high tension that can be expected with gut strings and assumes that the strings were tuned to g and a.
  23. ^ Franz Jahnel: The guitar and its construction. Technology of guitar, lute, mandolin, sister, tanbur and string. Verlag Das Musikinstrument, Frankfurt am Main 1977, p. 28.
  24. Torban. In: Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine .
  25. ^ Sibyl Marcuse, 1975, p. 428.
  26. ^ Roman Turovsky: V. The torbanists. torban.org
  27. Torban . In: Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine .
  28. Olga Ossadzja: On the history of the Ukrainian sheet music editions in Galicia in the 19th and early 20th centuries . In: History of Music in Central and Eastern Europe. Issue 2, Chemnitz 1998, pp. 33-39, here p. 38.